tagged w/ LTE
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Time to call in the wireless waahmbulance. LightSquared's billionaire backer Phil Falcone made his television debut on CNBC's Power Lunch to cry foul at the behind-the-scenes lobbying drama that could put the brakes on his 4G dreams. The hedge fund manager pointed his finger at AT&T and Verizon, claiming both are trying to "stomp out innovation" and competition by working in cahoots with the Save Our GPS Coalition. The soon-to-launch LTE network continues to encounter significant opposition from the group, as its tests have shown LightSquared's planned 40,000 stations will transmit signals "up to 800 billion times" more powerful than low-powered GPS, effectively blocking it out. Falcone insists that all parties involved knew of the potential interference issues back in 2003, when the FCC first mandated the network's build-out, and promises a switch to the company's lower block of spectrum will remedy 99 percent of the problem. Whichever side of this he said / they said brouhaha you believe, one thing's for sure -- the 4G race is getting pretty ugly.Time to call in the wireless waahmbulance. LightSquared's billionaire backer Phil... more
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Own an HTC ThunderBolt? Experiencing poor battery life? Well, Verizon has confirmed that it will be releasing a battery double the size of the one currently inside the handset.Own an HTC ThunderBolt? Experiencing poor battery life? Well, Verizon has confirmed... more
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Thought the HTC ThunderBolt launch couldn’t get any more ridiculous? Take a look at what Verizon is doing in their retail stores.Thought the HTC ThunderBolt launch couldn’t get any more ridiculous? Take a look... more
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Its 2.5-inch lightRadios could replace some 200-foot behemoths
Almost everything electronic—modems, PCs, cellphones—becomes dramatically smaller and more powerful each year. Not cell towers. They're still big, ugly, and expensive. Most were designed with the simple goal of transmitting plain old phone calls, so towers are easily overwhelmed by smartphone users who now want to not only call grandma but also upload photos and stream TV shows. The current solution to network congestion is "building bigger and bigger cell towers in more places," says the president of Alcatel-Lucent's wireless division, Wim Sweldens. That's cost-prohibitive in vast rural expanses and pretty much impossible in dense urban areas. "It's no longer sustainable," he says.
On Feb. 7, Alcatel-Lucent (ALU) introduced a Rubik's cube-sized device called lightRadio that could help bring an end to the bigger-is-better approach. Most of today's cell towers are 200-foot monsters topped with an unsightly gangle of antennae. Each lightRadio unit measures 2.5 inches across and weighs just 10.5 oz. That compact package contains radios and antennae for each of the major cellular technologies—2G, 3G, and LTE. Carriers can plop them wherever they need more coverage, so long as an electrical source is available—on telephone poles, building rooftops, and bus stop shelters. "This will dramatically change the way mobile networks are built," says Sweldens.
Smartphone users won't be able to download Top Chef via these modules just yet. While carriers say they are very interested in the technology, none have committed to testing it yet, let alone buying it. And while the first versions of the lightRadio devices could help quickly plug holes in coverage, they'll still need to be wired to a cellular base station, the cabinet-sized rack of gear usually housed in a basement or shed at the bottom of a cell tower. (Base stations convert mobile, analog signals into digital ones and send them across a carrier's underground broadband cables.) By 2014, Alcatel-Lucent hopes to integrate all of the bulky base-station technology into lightRadio units as well.
Carriers are scrambling to cope with a steep rise in mobile traffic, which is increasing by 26 percent a year, according to Cisco Systems (CSCO), the world's largest networking gear supplier. The economics of the Internet make keeping up difficult. Though consumers are downloading more movies and apps on their phones, wireless carriers don't generally make extra revenue from these "data hogs," as some call them. "The economics are getting worse," says Sweldens. LightRadio devices, he claims, could lower the cost of new cellular investments by as much as 50 percent. One big expense that lightRadio minimizes: the price of winning approval from the not-in-my-backyard types who fight proposed cell towers. "Site acquisition is the Achilles' heel of every wireless carrier," says Jeffrey M. Thompson, chief executive officer of Towerstream, which offers high-speed cellular service in 11 U.S. cities, including New York. He says it often takes a year to win approval to build a new tower.
Carriers have lately been trying to alleviate network strain by keeping people from using the cell network at all. For several years they've offered consumers the option to buy "femtocells," small gadgets for the home that intercept a mobile user's phone calls and data requests and send them over cable and DSL lines instead of airwaves. It's a tough sell: Carriers are essentially asking customers to pay for a device whose only function is to make their cell service tolerable. (In some cases they give femtocells to subscribers for free.) About a million people have taken them up on the offer, according to Dell'Oro Group, a market research firm.
LightRadio is the first major attempt to rethink the cell tower itself, says Michael Howard, co-founder of research firm Infonetics Research. Asked if any other networking company is working on something like lightRadio, Howard says "If they weren't, they are now."
The bottom line: Alcatel-Lucent hopes its compact lightRadio module will change the economics of upgrading congested cellular networks.
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/11_10/b4218035917830.htmIts 2.5-inch lightRadios could replace some 200-foot behemoths
Almost everything... more
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Wondering how Verizon is going to upgrade the Motorola Xoom with 4G LTE capabilities? Then you probably want to check this ugly piece of evidence out.Wondering how Verizon is going to upgrade the Motorola Xoom with 4G LTE capabilities?... more
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BARCELONA — At the Mobile World Congress, the industry’s largest annual gathering being held here this week, the corporate visionaries of the business agreed that a challenge they all would face was managing the avalanche of demand for mobile data services fueled by the growth in smartphones.
And some of the 50,000 attendees at the event got a firsthand taste of how daunting that challenge might be. Mobile service was at times spotty, and while reception was generally steady, calling volumes tended to be low and some people strained to hear their mobile conversations. Sometimes, calls simply did not go through.
As the popularity of smartphones continues to grow, the challenge, on a global scale, may only get greater. The European network equipment makers Ericsson and Alcatel-Lucent expect data traffic on the world’s mobile networks to increase 30 times through 2015. Huawei, a Chinese competitor, expects the traffic level to rise 500 times by 2020.
The number of mobile broadband subscribers, which was 600 million at the end of 2010, is expected to almost double this year to a billion and climb to five billion in 2016. Mobile network capacity will need to increase 20 to 25 times to handle that growing load, said Hans Vestberg, the Ericsson chief executive.
“In the future, we are going to live in a truly networked society,” Mr. Vestberg said. “This is going to have a tremendous influence on us and our lives.”
In Barcelona, Ericsson announced an alliance with Akamai, a company in Cambridge, Massachusetts, whose software and global network of 83,000 computer servers provides a deluxe, accelerated path through the Internet clutter for the Web traffic of the world’s largest businesses, to integrate the company’s software into Ericsson network equipment.
Once the gear is installed in phone networks, the general public should experience a faster mobile Web, said David Kenny, the president of Akamai. But that, he added, may take three to four years.
Huawei, the world’s second-largest equipment maker, after Ericsson, introduced a new cellphone base station that transmits in all five commonly used frequency bands. Previously, operators had to use five times as much equipment.
In 2009, Huawei was the first to sell a base station that could transmit calls in the three commonly used technical standards for cellphones: GSM, 3G, and Long Term Evolution, the latest technology. Its SingleRAN station, short for Single Radio Access Network, has fueled the company’s rapid growth.
But this year, Alcatel-Lucent, which has gone through a wrenching reorganization after the 2006 trans-Atlantic merger that created it, may have grabbed the spotlight. The company introduced a cellphone base station the size of a Rubik’s cube, weighing only 300 grams, or 10.6 ounces, that mimics the capability of a standard base station. A matrix of eight such cubes laid side by side, roughly the size of a small stereo speaker, can transmit more than two miles, or 3.2 kilometers.
Jean-Pierre Lartigue, vice president for wireless marketing and strategy at Alcatel-Lucent, said the tiny base station consumed 50 percent less electricity than conventional base stations. Developed at Alcatel-Lucent’s Bell Labs, the cube is made of a plastic compound and contains 200 patented innovations.
At the Alcatel-Lucent exhibition booth, which was adjacent to Huawei’s, engineers and operator executives were jostling to get a view of the cube, peppering Alcatel-Lucent representatives with questions about the technology. Three big operators, Verizon Wireless, the U.S. market leader; Orange, the mobile brand of France Télécom; and China Mobile have already entered into agreements with Alcatel-Lucent to test the cubes.
Ben Verwaayen, the Alcatel-Lucent chief executive whose emphasis on research and development helped bring the company back to profit in the fourth quarter, said the pace of innovation would stay ahead of a wireless data crunch. Any reception problems at the industry event, which he said he had not experienced, were not caused by shortcomings in the technology, he added.
“Living in a connected society has become a global political issue,” Mr. Verwaayen said, pointing to the recent uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia, fueled in part by wireless networks and social networking technology. “We are coming to the point where society is seeing an actual need to stay connected.”
At the Barcelona show, Claire Cranton, a spokeswoman for the GSM Association, the industry sponsor of the event, said that she had received no complaints regarding phone service.
Matt Henkes, the editor in chief of AppsTech, a Web site based in Bristol, England, that is set to go live next month with coverage of the mobile applications industry, said he and his colleagues experienced weak calling volumes using their iPhones. “I think it is because there are so many smartphone users competing for a cell,” Mr. Henkes said. “This illustrates the potential problem the industry is facing.”BARCELONA — At the Mobile World Congress, the industry’s largest annual... more
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Hoping to get your hands on Verizon’s HTC ThunderBolt or Motorola Xoom tablet? Be prepared to fork over some dough.Hoping to get your hands on Verizon’s HTC ThunderBolt or Motorola Xoom tablet?... more
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Samsung and Verizon have announced plans to bring a nameless yet beautiful looking LTE compatible device to shelves in the coming days.Samsung and Verizon have announced plans to bring a nameless yet beautiful looking LTE... more
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Motorola has just announced the next Droid branded device, the LTE capable Motorola Droid Bionic which will be available sometime in the near future.Motorola has just announced the next Droid branded device, the LTE capable Motorola... more
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Today at CES in Las Vegas, AT&T announced that it has accelerated its 4G LTE roll out plans and the network will begin to deploy in U.S. cities by mid-2011.Today at CES in Las Vegas, AT&T announced that it has accelerated its 4G LTE roll... more
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A short time after a photo of Verizon’s HTC 4G LTE device surfaced, a photo of Samsung’s decided to do the same thing and it appears that it will be the first device on the carrier with a front facing camera.A short time after a photo of Verizon’s HTC 4G LTE device surfaced, a photo of... more
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HTC’s Incredible HD has leaked out in a series of photos just ahead of Verizon’s Android LTE announcement at CES. Coincidence? Doubtful.HTC’s Incredible HD has leaked out in a series of photos just ahead of... more
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Verizon has confirmed that it will be announcing LTE Android devices on January 6th at CES.Verizon has confirmed that it will be announcing LTE Android devices on January 6th at... more
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HTC’s CEO Peter Chou has confirmed that his company would be putting any LTE enabled smartphones on the market until the second half of 2011. Bummer.HTC’s CEO Peter Chou has confirmed that his company would be putting any LTE... more
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The latest has the rumored HTC Incredible HD being a Verizon 4G LTE enabled device. If that’s true, this thing is going to sell like hot cakes.The latest has the rumored HTC Incredible HD being a Verizon 4G LTE enabled device. If... more
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Need more information on the differences between Sprint’s WiMax and Verizon’s upcoming 4G LTE? Well then, check out some of this information.Need more information on the differences between Sprint’s WiMax and... more
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Verizon has made their 4G LTE plans official. It will be hitting 38 cities and 60 airports by the end of 2010.Verizon has made their 4G LTE plans official. It will be hitting 38 cities and 60... more
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Verizon has announced that it will be unveiling its LTE plans tomorrow at the CTIA conference in San Francisco.Verizon has announced that it will be unveiling its LTE plans tomorrow at the CTIA... more
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A leaked document indicates that Best Buy will be receiving LTE devices starting sometime in the fall. Anyone excited?A leaked document indicates that Best Buy will be receiving LTE devices starting... more
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